On September 30, 2015, in those far-off days when the UK was a fully-fledged member of the European Union, then-European Commissioner Jonathan Hill announced the launch of a new initiative called the “capital markets union”.

Almost 60 years of European construction had still not created anything approaching a single market for investment, and in many EU countries capital markets remained weak and underdeveloped. The worthy aim, Hill wrote, was “to identify the barriers to the cross-border flow of investment”, and “work out how to overcome them step by step”.